curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Let's say I love trump, and read this post. Am I persuaded otherwise? Even if I dislike Trump, do I gain anything?
Watching the press briefing Trump gave... something in me finally broke.
What press briefing? What broke? You changed your mind on trump - millions of people have. What made the difference? As it stands, not a good post.
Sex-segregating the prisons is part of how you keep the prison rape rate as close to zero as possible. This is like "frankly, there shouldn't be seatbelts or airbags. Cars should just not crash". Well, they don't not crash, so seatbelts and airbags are useful. And the rape rate in sex-segregated prisons is still nonzero. If you have some idea about how to make the rape rate zero without sex-segregation ... feel free to propose it.
At the same time, it is true that 'trans rape in prison' is an extremely noncentral objection to trans issues as a whole.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Probably not a language model. Reddit has had spambots since it was available on the web. A very common form of reddit spambot just reposts pieces of other peoples' comments - not to push a message or anything, just to gain karma, so the account can get past simple spam filters and be used later or sold. Same for repost bots - repost old posts, get karma, use or sell.
Looking closer - conclusionfirm's comment has been removed, while breathagreeable's is still up - breathagreeable has an active post history, while that's conclusionfirm's only comment - from your SS, conclusionfirm's is newer than breathagreeable's - and conclusionfirms' comment is a direct substring of breathagreeable's! So it's almost certainly that spambot strategy, breath posted a real comment, conclusion reposted a substring of it to get karma - and not gpt3 or anything.
curious_straight_ca
26d ago
Funnily enough:
One of the earliest described cases of BID was termed apotemnophilia by Money in 1977
Yes, that John Money!
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
If you're gonna reppost your substack piece here, please at least put in the effort to copy the whole contents of the post into your toplevel. If Ymeskhout can do it, you can too. And maybe less of "Remember to subscribe"?
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
This post needs a lot more elaboration. Many mottizens are straightforwardly conservatives, so 'degenerate tendencies in Con politics', conservatives coming from 'lost causers', 'proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion' aren't going to land as anything other than insults. And even if we were all on your team, it's still better to explain why something is true than just state it. As someone who disagrees - I don't love 'conservatism' either but just don't see the strong connections to the South - why should this persuade me?
This is a somewhat popular opinion on 'the left' though, I've seen it on twitter a bunch.
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
When something is presented to a legislature, that doesn't mean the whole legislature endorses it, just that some members found it interesting enough to present. The congress has over 600 members. I'm sure most are intelligent and don't believe in aliens, but it only takes a few. And belief in extraterrestrials is popular - polls find >1/3 of americans believe - so it's very plausible some congress members just genuinely believe. Or are pandering to constituents who do, or trying to get attention. This parsimoniously explains why 'governments do aliens', without reaching for any hidden strategy. Imo, this explains every case of 'large institution endorsing UFOs', one of which I described here.
The UFO researcher [who presented this], who appears regularly in Mexican media to present his purported findings, has previously been associated with claims of discoveries that have later been debunked. In 2015, Maussan unveiled the existence of what was alleged to be an alien body unearthed in Nazca, Peru. Later, though, that "alien" discovery was debunked, and the mummified corpse was shown to be that of a human child with a head deformity, according to fact-checking website snopes.com. In fact, such elongated skulls have often been explained by anthropologists as the result of an ancient practice of artificial cranial deformation. As a part of what could be an ancient religious ritual, young children had their heads bound in cloth, rope and even wooden boards, according to snopes.com.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Disagree with below - it's very different from what he usually says. Discussing your emotional distaste for LGBTs analytically or unemotionally discussing the lower mean IQ of blacks while still ultimately promoting democracy and race-blind meritocracy, arguing the MSM is still better than the right-wing media and talking about how jews are universally successful due to their genes, claiming that veganism is a strong moral position even if he still disagrees with it - is very far from denouncing the "ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite" and promoting the Turner Diaries. e.g. Doglatine wouldn't have claimed Hanania was a very interesting writer if he was still doing the second.
I also think Hanania is more correct now than he was ten years ago, and suspect he has, to a significant extent, actually changed his mind (compare to Karlin's more limited moves in that direction). Although obviously he's still going to strategically conceal some ideas that are too distasteful.
I have not been particularly impressed on the occasions that Hanania has been linked.
If you are very right-wing, he might be a breath of fresh air to see support for stronger right-wing ideas (IQ and merit and correlation with race, crime) coexist with lambasting of weaker right-wing ideas (universal anti-immigration, populism, ...).
Twitter's backseat CEO has announced his intention to rename twitter:
And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds
If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow
He then reposted an animated X
There's a delirious, fantasy quality to Elon's management of twitter. Is this a joke? Does anyone know? Why make consequential business announcements on your personal account, mixed with memes and joke business announcements? Either way, it's hilarious.
I wonder how Linda feels about all of this. Does she have much internal responsibility?
I think the rename is a poor business decision, if not that consequential of one - a lot of people really like the 'Twitter' name. And 'X' is not a very distinct name, if that's what he'll rename it to.
Imagining a future neoreactionary tech-CEO deciding to rename the United States during a manic episode
Let's say we add the new lanes, and congestion stays the same, and travel times stay the same. Is this a failure?
Let's say you have a single supermarket in a town. It's too crowded, the lines are always long. A second supermarket opens in a town. There's enough demand that, now, both supermarkets are too crowded, and the lines are too long. Is this bad? No, it's strictly an improvement - more people are buying food now! And the supermarket makes more money!
The same is true of 'induced demand' - the goal of 'reduce congestion' wasn't accomplished, but a separate goal of 'more people getting to where they want to' was. The extra people who drive on the new highway are benefitting greatly from the change - they can now get to places they couldn't before!
No, it would be a net decrease, because the cost of doing so would be very high, and those resources could be more efficiently used elsewhere.
That's ... not a net decrease. That's a 'suboptimal policy'. It's only a net decrease if those resources would be used more efficiently elsewhere absent the highway. Which, I think you would agree when looking at the rest of the city budget, they're not likely to be any time soon.
It would suck for anyone who currently lives in the area and has to deal with additional car traffic
A net decrease would require comparing that 'dealing with additional traffic' to the new jobs or new activities the people the additional traffic brings, or the economic benefits from the businesses employing / serving the additional traffic. And ... I can't see how that comes out net negative. Having your property sized does suck, yeah, and I'm not sure how to factor that cost in - but that's basically a universal cost of development, so it doesn't obviously bring the total negative.
Your 30x-great-grandparents didn't have diapers, and any cloth their child wore, the woman probably had to spin or weave herself. Food was available, but instead of being "$1/lb of lentils", had to be sown and harvested by hand (unless a bad season came, in which case, hopefully you have enough preserved). Instead of 'decent, but not ideal labor laws' - maybe you were a serf. Medical care was often counterproductive in the 1800s, to say nothing of the 1600s, and ~ half your kids would die before adulthood - vs today, where advanced medical technology built on millions of man-hours of basic research and 'big pharma' development is available to both the poor and the rich, and the gap continues to close (even things like 'obamacare' helped a little!). With within-state freedom of movement, a functioning rental market, a, by any historical standard, class-free and socially permissive society, and the internet, 'replacing a network' is easier than ever - 'moving to a new city' isn't a catastrophe. Historically, 'plane tickets' or 'moving truck rentals' weren't available to people of any class. Interstate travel is, today, incredibly cheap in any sense. Historical people lived in a society 100x more backwards and reactionary than ... even the backwards evangelicals of 2000. Instead of a therapist, a priest?
Despite all of that, said grandparents would, given the calories available, and after accounting for childhood mortality, have a TFR of 3 or higher. This is both because birth control didn't exist, because children became economically useful quickly, and because it was heavily socially valued. Every point you made is on a strong trajectory towards 'less of a burden' - yet you just don't prioritize having children over them!
curious_straight_ca
24d ago
I don't sense much anger tbh. I might see a post get downvoted because it's too left-wing or something, but all the responses are still usually polite even when they disagree. Even when someone's accusing the outgroup of destroying civilization it's done in a very literary way over multiple paragraphs, as opposed to what you see on twitter
From the article UnHerd cites:
“He hides his fingers, keeps them flexed, leading to impaired dexterity, localized pain, irritability and anger,” Dr. Nadia Nadeau, of the department of psychiatry at Université Laval wrote in the journal Clinical Case Reports. He grew more determined to find a way to get rid of fingers he considered “intrusive, foreign, unwanted.”
“He had contemplated asking a friend to watch over him and be prepared to call emergency services in case his attempt led to a need for resuscitation,” Nadeau wrote.
After undergoing elective amputation, the nightmares and emotional distress immediately stopped, Nadeau said. The post-op pain resolved within a week, there was no “phantom pain” at one month follow-up and, without the two missing fingers, “he was able to pursue the life he envisioned as a complete human being without those two fingers bothering him.”
It’s not the first time amputation has been used as a treatment for BID. In the late 1990s, a surgeon in Scotland amputated one leg above the knee each in two men who’d felt a “desperate” need to be amputees, and who had been turned away by other doctors.
Despite the scandal that erupted, “At the end of the day I have no doubt that what I was doing was the correct thing for those patients,” the surgeon, Dr. Robert Smith, told a press conference.
The fact that there were only two fingers involved in the Quebec case, as opposed to a complete limb, made the decision to proceed easier for the medical team, Nadeau said.
If this now-amputee were me, I'd try to just get over it. Stop taking any action to either sate or resist the discomfort, meditate real hard, just feel it and let it burn out. I think it'd work for me.
But it's a mistake to not understand the other side's perspective. You have a guy who's constantly distressed, whose daily life is significantly impaired, who's begging for help, where many pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions have failed, and a simple operation will fix his problem permanently. It makes a certain amount of sense, right? This guy's had this problem since he was a child, and it is a doctors' job to fix it, and nothing else is working.
It reminds me of
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
But I think the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue.
Amputating a few fingers is somewhat more invasive than putting a hairdryer in your car. But it's the same principle, right?
That's from the categories are made for man, which Zack's spent a lot of time disagreeing with because, yes, it was about trans people and how to treat them. I didn't even remember that was why Scott told that story until I looked it up again today.
And, it's a good analogy, because this is what it feels like for a medical professional dealing with trans patients. You have adults who beg for hormone treatments, claim to be and appear to be in severe distress due to lacking them, and do indeed appear to improve after taking them. This is what it should look like! There are issues with kids, issues with surgery, but none of those undermine the obvious case for accepting trans people and treating them with hormones - it seems to make them happier and better. Again, yeah, edge cases, but the trans people I know are not perpetually depressed psychological wrecks like you'd expect from rw twitter memes, they're generally normal and happy.
Claiming otherwise requires some sophisticated reasoning, like one that claims happiness or sexual satisfaction are of little value themselves, and only matter when done for in line with a greater purpose - in this case, marriage and having children. And since trans individuals imitate the appearance of sexuality without the fertility backing it, it's bad. I agree with something like that.
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured
If A is evidence for B, B should be evidence for A, yes? "One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens?" If we took this case being a novel case of unnecessary amputation as evidence that trans ideology has thoroughly captured the medical system, or something like that, and then we observe that this isn't novel - I think we should doubt the reasoning that led to the claim of ideological capture.
edit: here is the paper about the case.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
It’s an entrenched mythology of capitalism that companies lower prices based on competition. This hardly ever works in the real world
Huh? Then why have the prices of wood, steel, food, electricity, computing power, plastic, televisions, phones, and literally every material good ever declined by orders of magnitude over the past four centuries? When we observe any specific one, what we see is that new, more efficient or productive techniques enter the market at lower prices and drive out higher priced competitors, over and over. What am I missing?
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Claudine Gay should've been fired. Fired for not being qualified, not for having done plagiarism. If Harvard scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find a black woman academic who hasn't committed plagiarism and elevates them to President, nothing's actually improved. The reason we have a plagiarism rule is because plagiarism is bad, not as a tool to use to take out opponents who've done other bad things, even when said opponents deserve it. It's a much more 'symmetric' weapon than the weapon one wants - 'she's not qualified, so she shouldn't have the job'.
If you're going to make a toplevel post about "are gays smarter", IMO you should at least type the thing into google scholar.
This paper (which I haven't even skimmed) claims homosexuals are on average more intelligent. I could see it being true that smart people are more likely to apply that intelligence to their actions and thus be 'weird' and either actually be homosexual, or to engage in homosexual-ish behavior without having the usual innate cause (if that exists). But, eh, one paper of the usual quality isn't enough to believe anything this fuzzy.
... I wish there was just a 'biobank' dataset I could download and query for the correlation between IQ reported sexual orientation. Publication bias, p hacking, would instantly disappear as concerns. I'd probably vote for a law that nonconsensually released all of my demographic, medical, and other useful data along with everyone else's (it wouldn't be quite as useful if it was opt-in, but it'd still be useful).
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
It's just weird, it's a significant breach of usual social norms, it just feels right to wince and ignore it.
You don't like game shows, you don't like MrBeast, you find the concept that a random guy's making you do something for some amount of money weird. Showing up in a popular youtube video feels weird.
You're on your way to a class, you're in the middle of thinking about something important, you're on a schedule, you just don't want to be disrupted by something uncertain.
(I'd be #2 or #3)
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
I like the new thread, he collected a lot more relevant information into one place where more people will see it.
curious_straight_ca
10mo ago
The 'dissident right' does not refer to catturd2, who is a relatively normal conservative twitter person. Dissident right refers to like, moldbug or bap. Although the broad statement about the DR is still mostly true.
"These tweets are dumb" isn't a good toplevel post (unless you start there and go somewhere else interesting), almost all tweets are dumb.
curious_straight_ca
10mo ago
I agree that lawns are bad in that sense, and that HOA rules requiring lawns are also bad. I even think you could draw on that as part of a broader criticism of the suburbs and the american middle class or whatever.
But you don't really do that, just 'they have bad taste and are annoying but still are mean to poor people', in a rdrama style rant
And I personally enjoy the rdrama rant as a genre, but this place really isn't for it - "My office plankton job makes me inherently superior to those dirty poors, who just lack my good, old-fashioned work ethic" is considered to be boo outgroup, just a content-free insult, here.
According to an askhistorians post, just going off of volume consumed significantly overestimates their alcohol consumption -
Most ancient wines probably had an alcohol content around 15% ... In most cases, however, the wine consumed at social gatherings was probably between two-thirds and three-fourths water, which would have reduced the alcoholic content to about that of modern beer.
Your study is probably cherrypicked / poorly conducted / something, just because it's a cool-sounding popular study about human psychology.
Any amount of alcohol temporarily reduces intelligence and precision in your physical movements - a tiny bit if buzzed, a lot if drunk. Having that all the time seems dumb.
Natural selection has tuned our ability to be glad and bond with others over millenia - it'd be weird if the baseline value was simply too low, and constant intake of fermented grain was ideal. Whatever effect alcohol has on various neurotransmitters would be quite 'easy' to evolve ... but it didn't, and you're going to knock all sorts of useful and functional relationships out of balance by being constantly buzzed.
(OP was a good post though!)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
"got the interview through misrepresentation" and "burn 30 minutes of this person's time" implied something much more severe and obvious, like - "job's for experienced java developer, i kinda know javascript". If 10 vs 7-9 years experience was the main ""misrepresentation"", variation in job performance from skill/intelligence/character is quite a bit more than any difference in experience from three more years, you could easily be a good fit.
homeless shelters [...] gave them first-hand and literal application of “yes in my backyard”
YIMBYs aren't advocating for new homeless shelters, they're advocating for more residential development, generally - and, at the margin, those units will be filled by normal people who are able to pay slightly less than current residents are, not the homeless. (Maybe affordable unit requirements mess with this? idk) Maybe if somewhere went full YIMBY rents would drop a lot, but that seems unlikely imo. YIMBYs claim more housing will help with homelessness not because poor druggies will be able to live alongside rich families, but because increases in stocks everywhere means more rich-ish people can live near you, freeing up units in middle-class areas for middle-class people, who'll put less pressure on poorer areas ... etc.
Coase's theorem relies on zero transaction costs, which are not present IRL when negotiating between diffuse collections of residents and state and local governments. And it guarantees pareto efficiency, which (by definition) leaves massive improvements on the table if a few people are very stubborn, e.g. strongly prefer 'not in my backyard' even over being paid.
So is it that high prices, specifically, keep out the wrong kinds of people? That would still allow a lot of building that might only lower prices somewhat. And is it really worth spending 25-35% of everyone's income on rent to maintain that? Even if [high rent, no building, good communities] is better than [low rent, lots of building, bad communities], there must be a way to achieve 'good communities' without banning building - although not necessarily a politically viable one.
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/live-from-the-hate-march
It was Armistice Day last weekend. One hundred and five years ago, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the First World War ended. They’re very pretty, all those upright ones. A good piece of trivia for schoolchildren to learn. But the armistice was actually signed at 5 am that morning, and to get that nice symmetrical figure the war had to keep going for six more pointless hours. The Germans had asked for hostilities to end immediately; they were refused. So shortly afterwards, an American unit tried to cross the Meuse under heavy fire. British artillery corps, reasoning that it would be more expensive to lug their shells home than to simply fire them all now, spent those last six hours unleashing one last hellish barrage up and down the German lines. French soldiers stormed occupied villages, and many of them died. Nearly three thousand men died on the 11th of November, considerably more than on any average day on the Western Front. Most of their graves say that they fell on the 10th instead. Better that than the indignity of dying for no reason, for no objective, for nobody’s advantage, to change nothing, in a war that was already over but still kept on churning, kept chewing through its victims, simply because war is what there was, and it needs no other justification than that. Those six hours were war in its purest form: no politics, just total sourceless hostility. The moment was coming when the people in the other trenches would simply get up and walk home, and to fire a shot at them would be murder—but right up until that moment, you could still get your sport or pleasure from pinching out a stranger’s life. Perform the rites of the White God. There were generals who wanted their last chance at glory; soldiers too. The last man to die was one Private Henry Gunther, an American. A few months previously, he’d been knocked down from sergeant for complaining about conditions on the front; he wanted to get his pips back, and he didn’t have long. Alone, he charged a German machine-gun nest with his bayonet. At first, the gunners tried to shoo him away. But he kept running at them, so in the very last minute of the war they shot him dead. Afterwards, his rank was posthumously restored and his corpse was issued a citation for gallantry in action, along with the Distinguished Service Cross. Maybe the worst thing about war is that sometimes, you really can get exactly what you want.
Mostly it's just great writing, but it doesn't belong in the main thread because I have nothing to add (edit: also, now that i've actually read the rest, it doesn't belong in the main thread anyway, and I don't agree at all, but it's insanely good writing). It almost seemed too grimly poetic to actually be mostly true - that was, initially, going to be my Small Scale Question, or maybe "is it misleading somehow" - but it checks out to like 2 minutes of research.
So, uh, genuine small scale question: If someone wants to post something here that doesn't quite fit into one of the themed threads, but where they can't muster a full toplevel post, where does/should it go? Are we missing a whole class of posts like that?
(The rest of the article is more directly CW about palestine protests, and also quickly devolves into lurid hallucinations)
Nuking the third-party apps and killing pushshift are both overall surplus-destroying moves, especially since Reddit's search function does not work and their mobile app sucks (and mostly in ways that are orthogonal to extracting money from users!). I'm not entirely sure how the admins benefit from making the API prices this artificially high to kill apps? If you're worried about ads, why not just introduce an ad SDK for third-party mobile apps or require them to give you 50% of their in app purchase revenue or something. Also not sure that banning pushshift and requiring paid API access will stop scraping for LLMs, because normal web scraping of HTML the way archive.org, google, and everyone else does still works.
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